London Mela: Event 'attracted fantastic, diverse audience'

Europe's largest South Asian Festival, the London Mela, returned to a mercifully sunny Gunnersbury Park on Sunday (September 6) to a crowd of 15,000.

The festival played host to arts, dance, music and more, with performances from Imran Khan, the Dhol Academy, Mobille Homme and Veena Parashar, to name just a few.

The one-day festival closed to a spectacular backdrop of fireworks.

Music ranged from classical to hip hop over the event's eight stages and areas, and over 80% of the attendees this year rated the London Mela as "very good", organisers said.

A spokesman for the event said: "The festival was a resounding success with stand-out performances from Mumbai-based Benny Dayal and his band Funktuation who travelled to London to appear at the event."

The festival has been running for 13 years, and this is the first event in which visitors have had to pay to get in.

Producer of London Mela, Julian Rudd, said: "We were delighted that we attracted such a fantastic, diverse audience in our first year of charging for the event, which provides a solid base to build from over the coming years.

"After many years of reductions in public funding, we made the brave decision to introduce a charge for entry in order to maintain the high quality programme and production values of the event.

"Our vision is for an ambitious, artistically-led festival that presents international and UK artists of the highest quality. We also aim to develop new programme strands with our sponsorship partners, who were all delighted with the event."

For more information on the London Mela, or to keep an eye out for details of next year's event, check out the official website.